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doubt this man will cast a shadow larger than Whitman, this man
is
Whitman. I don’t care too much for the others, sorry to say, not to cast aspersions, even on Mr. Snyder. I was never cool enough for Burroughs or Jewish enough for Ginsberg. None of the rest really matter—except the strange case of Neal Cassady, of course. He’s indispensible. I had a sort of divine vision once that if it were possible to exhume his body, one would find it transformed to vellum, in true Ginsbergian holiness, because at the end he was no longer human, Jack the princess had kissed Neal the frog and restored him to the original, magisterial state of what he was meant to be: a book, a book of
life.
If I could write, I might try a little Borgesian fairy tale along those lines . . . O, the Beats, the Beats, the Beats! If you took everyone away and were left with just Kerouac, you’d be just fine. All would be right with the windblown world.
    All right. Okay
. Good. Sorry.
    I want to get back to my wife’s preoccupation with incarcerated living.
    I never had a wonderful feeling about it—her teaching there. Not even the women’s jail. I’ve seen enough documentaries on MSNBC to know bad things happen on prison visits. You don’t hear about every incident, that’s all. Teachers raped in the prison library, raped and killed by lifers. Just because there’s a bunch of guards doesn’t mean a thing. These guys are barely making minimum wage. Most of them are crooks too, creeps and sadists. When Kelly was doing her thing at the Women’s Correctional in San Mateo I didn’t have too bad a vibe. But San Quentin took it to a new level.
    Kelly hooked up with something called the Prison Dharma Network. The PDN went around the country giving meditation and mindfulness workshops to folks who were locked up. They called their teachings Path of Freedom. The Jewish mafia of the Middle Way sat on the board. You know, all the roshi–Rosh Hashanah
machers
—Ram Dass, Goldstein, Glassman, Kornfield, Salzburg. The PDN put Kelly through a fairly intense orientation but it was nothing like the one the staff gave her at San Q: what to do if a riot breaks out, what to do if you’re taken hostage, that sort of thing. Part of the allure was ego. It was kind of a trophy gig—frontline bodhisattva service. It was
sexy.
That as a woman she had the balls to suck it up and walk straight into the belly of the beast . . .
for the enlightenment of others.
I think she dug people at the Zen Center knowing too. Gave her a major uptick in the incestuous world of the sangha,
where competition for humility was dog-eat-dog.
    The tape recorder stopped but new batteries didn’t help. I had to go into town to buy a replacement so we broke for lunch.

    I was raised in Santa Ana, California.
    An altar boy.
    You can see where this is going.
    I was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. That’s why I was on disability. I had panic attacks for years, sometimes ten in a day. If you’ve ever had a full-blown panic attack, you know that means ten times a day you are
one-hundred
percent certain
you are going to die. Like,
immediately.
Don’t have ’em anymore, thank God, and I’m not on meds either. When it comes to victims of child sex abuse, PTSD is pretty much guaranteed. You can set your watch by it. That means night terrors, bedwetting, cutting, bulimia—the whole package. We had wonderful lawyers. From the minute they filed, they made sure we had top-flight care, that we saw the best of the best. I got put on a prescription cocktail that settled my nerves. One of the side effects was weight gain (and excessive cocksucking). Hey, I’ll pick weight gain over night terrors and panic attacks all day long.
    That’s what I was waiting for during the couch potato Zen years—the settlement. Took about five years. We had a few